Doctor Who: 10 Great Actors Who Were Completely Wasted

3. Daniel Kaluuya (Planet Of The Dead)

Doctor Who Daniel Kaluuya Planet Of The Dead
BBC

Even though Planet Of The Dead is a longer-than-usual episode, it still couldn't give many of its supporting actors some interesting material to work with, which brings us to its second offence on this list: wasting Daniel Kaluuya.

A passenger on the double-decker bus that ends up being transported to a barren sandy planet, it's not a stretch to say that Kaluuya does nothing in the episode: once the bus has crashed, he's left to try and dig it out of the sand, while the Doctor and Christina sort out the important plot stuff.

In fact, you could go as far as saying that he doesn't even need to be in this story - his small amount of lines and actions could easily be given to someone else.

Now sure, every single episode of Doctor Who has disposable characters like this, but few of them are played by actors of Kaluuya's calibre. With roles in Get Out, Widows, and Black Panther, he's proven himself as one of the industry's brightest young talents in the last few years, and it's a shame that the Doctor Who production team didn't know how good he was back when Planet Of The Dead was initially produced.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.